On the Restoration, Valentine Greatrakes lost his offices, and was reduced to the position of a mere private gentleman. His estate at Affane was a small one; but he laboured on it with good results, introducing into his neighbourhood a more scientific system of agriculture than had previously been known there, and giving an unprecedented quantity of employment to the poor. Perhaps he missed the excitement of public business, and his energies, deprived of the vent they had for many years enjoyed, preyed upon his sensitive nature. Anyhow, he became the victim of his imagination, which, acting on a mind that had been educated in a school of spiritual earnestness and superstitious introspection, led him into a series of remarkable hallucinations. He first had fits of pensiveness and dejection, similar to those which tormented Cromwell ere his genius found for itself a more fit field of display than the management of a brewery and a few acres of marsh-land. Ere long he had an impulse, or a strange persuasion in his own mind (of which he was not able to give any rational account to another), which did very frequently suggest to him that there was bestowed on him the gift of curing the King's Evil, which for the extraordinariness of it, he thought fit to conceal for some time, but, at length communicated to his wife, and told her, "That he did verily believe that God had given him the blessing of curing the King's Evil; for, whether he were in private or publick, sleeping or waking, still he had the same impulse; but her reply was to him, that she conceived this was a strange imagination." Such is his statement.